Follow

Houses

Category

I visited the magnificent Château de Fontainebleau in May. It was a gorgeous sunny day, hot by mid-afternoon, even by Texas standards. Fabulous rich blue sky for photography! We went in the middle of the week, but being a World Heritage Site, it was full of people, including many groups of French schoolchildren sitting on the floor listening to their teachers.

A few words to the wise traveler

It’s a big palace; there’s room for everyone. You travel in a single line through the rooms, looping back at one point, confusingly. There are people fore and aft, but you can tuck yourself out of the path to study some detail or soak it all in. Everyone is very tolerant of photography these days. Though it is hard to take pictures of whole rooms, there are so many people and the light is pretty dim.

My usual strategy is to get to these places at opening time. Alas, I planned poorly. It took forever to find the right place in the Gare du Nord. You’d think there’d be signs for tourists going to a World Heritage Site, but no. Mom and I had to wander across three floors even to find an information desk that could give us the correct information. Then we needed correct change to buy tickets from a kiosk and had to run fast to catch the train. “Vite, vite, Madam!” the lady cried to my 86-year-old mother. Luckily, she’s fleet of foot.

Also, buy your tickets in advance, for the specific date you will go. France is lovely, there’s no denying it, but something is always on strike, half the things you want to see will be closed and the rest will be understaffed. There was 1 (ONE) woman working the ticket desk at this World Heritage Site on a sunny day in May. We waited in line for 40 minutes. Luckily, I had this fancy window latch to contemplate while we stood stock still for no apparent reason. This is what we call detailed craftsmanship.

It would also be a good idea to bring food and water. The restaurant was closed and there is no cafe. All they had for lunch was French breakfast tacos (ham and cheese crepes) served from a cart. So it’s France, so it’s excellent ham and cheese, but still.

History of the magnificent palace

Fontainebleau started out as a hunting lodge, convenient to the large royal forests around Paris. In 1137, it was called Fontem Blauhad, believe it or not, which means the spring or fountainhead of a person named Blizwald. Wikipedia tells us this with a straight face, so we must believe it.

Francis I (1494–1547) turned the hunting chateau into a palace of exceptional splendor. If you think that window latch is stylish, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet! Not one square inch of this place has been left undecorated. Also, we find the ‘F’ for ‘Francis’ absolutely everywhere, in case later generations forgot who built the place.

Every monarch from Francis to Louis XV (sweetly known as Louis the Beloved) added their own touches. The Beloved died in 1774, just before the whole monarchy situation went south. The palace is vast; we only get to tour a portion of it.

Francis is the one who imported the new Renaissance architectural style to France, as interpreted by his architect, Gilles le Breton. It’s a brilliant style; quintessentially French and handsome. Paris is full of buildings like this. That’s a large part of its eternal charm.

French Renaissance style

There is a still a large and scenic forest called Fontainebleau, to which Parisians regularly resort. I didn’t see it. If I’d been on my own, I would’ve done some hiking in there. But this wasn’t a research trip. I dragged my mother out to this busy place because it was there in Francis Bacon’s day. He probably spent some time there in his late teens. His cousin, Robert Cecil, certainly visited on diplomatic missions in the 1590s.

We start with an overview, swiped from the web somewhere. I do not have an aeroplane.

The red arrow on the right shows the entrance (lockers, tickets, guards). The other arrow shows where you exit. The display rooms run in a line on the second floor (first in British terms). We walk along to the horseshoe stairs and then go through the gallery connecting the front palace to the rear palace and then take a right (hook a roscoe, in Chicago terms). The chapel is on the other side there somewhere. I must confess the topography has me foxed. I’ll scan and post the floorplan.

Enter on the right; exit on the left.

Extra housing for courtiers

The famous horseshoe staircase

One more long shot and then we’re going inside.

The tour

The main idea is to regulate the flow of tourists, both modern and, I suspect, early modern. Elizabeth’s palaces were tourist attractions in her day; no reason this one wouldn’t have been. One of the functions of a magnificent palace to is show foreign visitors how magnificent you are.

Let’s see. The yellow building in the lower right portion of the palace houses some exhibits about Napoleon, which are very interesting unless you are focused on the late 16th century. Napoleon who? says me.

The bookshop is the last stop on the tour, unhelpfully, so I didn’t have this plan while we were cruising through. The thing that most interested me was the progression of rooms leading to the monarch. First the outer guard room, relatively plain (nothing here is really plain), then the inner guard room, for guards of greater rank, one supposes. Then we have presence chamber, private presence chamber, reception room, bedroom, another bedroom, and then we exit through rooms in the reverse order, ending with another guard room. Or that’s how it seemed to go.

It was hard to take pictures of rooms and I don’t want to scan the whole book. So we’ll just dip into the photo pool and take potluck instead of trying to reproduce the tour.

Rooms

A place to confer and to wait.

Armless chairs for ladies in huge dresses.

The gallery where we stroll in bad weather and mingle in all seasons.

The minstrel gallery in the great ballroom.

The chapel, shorn of all religious frippery.

The mind-blowing library.

Details

The people who invented Art Nouveaux must have seen this.

A typical bit of wall.

A typical bit of ceiling.

Some famous person’s bed. Note the mirror on the inside. Kinky? Or just vain?

His Majesty will see you now.

A lion AND a dragon, in case you thought Francis was a wimp.

This, because artists can be hard to keep on topic.

This, because Francis could have ridden an elephant everywhere if he wanted to — which he didn’t.

The little angel who said, “Meh.”

This guy just sits in the gateway, mouth eternally open, with his oddly Vulcan ears.

References

The fifth book in my Francis Bacon mystery series, Let Slip the Dogs, takes place at Richmond Palace. Alas, the palace is long gone, so I had to rely on history books and re-creations.

“Richmond was the most orderly and most logical of buildings, and both in its plan and elevations was the perfect expression of the Tudor conception of a community household.” (Dunlop, see below.)

From the beginning

Henry VII

The Tudor monarchs needed a lot of palaces. They built a strong, central government, centered around the monarch. All power descended from the throne. Sure, there were still a few odd dukes or overweening earls out there running their own fiefdoms, but little by little, the Tudors cut their heads off or otherwise reined them in.

With everybody dangling in the monarch’s train all the time, the palace gets dirty, the privies fill up, and all the comestibles in the area get eaten. When that happens, you’ve got to pack up and move on down the river — or up. So they had many palaces along the Thames, from Greenwich to Richmond.

There was a manor house at Sheen, as Richmond was originally called, from the time of Edward I (1239-1307). Richard II made Sheen his primary residence, until his beloved Anne of Bohemia died and he had the place pulled down in his grief. Henry V (not a Tudor, a Plantagenet) started rebuilding it, calling it Sheen Palace, a terrible name. It sounds like a palace well-polished with Acme Palace Polisher.

In 1497, the place burned down. Henry VII (the first Tudor king) rebuilt it. He named it Richmond Palace after the title he inherited from his father, the Earl of Richmond, thus neatly separating it from past associations. Bordering on the magnificent Richmond Park, it was a favorite hunting retreat until the Commonwealth demolished it, selling off the parts. Philistines.

First impressions

Here is the only decent image of the palace as it was. This is an engraving made in 1765 by James Basire, “From an ancient Drawing in the Possession of the Earl of Cardigan, Sumptibus Societatis Antiquariorum, (at the expense of the Society of Antiquaries) London, MDCCLXV.” (Wikipedia.)

When you write mysteries, you study this sort of picture intently, wondering what’s inside those windows and how hard it would be to push someone out. I don’t do that in this book, but it’s always an option. I just think it would be kind of hard to get away with, as a murder method.

I also think it’s a little odd to have windows opening onto the lawn leading right down to the river. That seems very insecure to me. What’s in those rooms? Guards? Or meeting rooms? They must have a few of those, since the Privy Council traveled with the monarch and met every day.

That cone-shaped roof covers the giant kitchen. The crenelatted structure to its right is the Great Hall. See the high, arched windows? Queen Elizabeth dined in private, but she liked for everyone else to eat together in the hall. Now that would’ve been something! Many courtiers brought their own cooks, who had to jostle for working space in the great kitchen. Must have been a semi-controlled madhouse, worthy of its own story, which I have not (yet) written.

A bend in the river

Let’s get oriented. Richmond is southwest of London, more west than South. These days, Richmond is a very posh suburb with lots of chi-chi clothing shops and a pretzel place in the train station that’s worth checking out. The river walk is lined with outdoor cafes and is a lovely, lovely popular place to spend an evening. My book of walking tours has a dandy 5-mile walk that begins and ends in cafe land. I’ll do another post about Richmond Park soon.

So here’s the long view of Richmond. Note the sinuous shape of the Thames in this stretch of river.

See where it curves up again on the right edge? That’s going to take a sharper turn to the north, go past Westminster, and swing on around east again. Richmond, as we can see, is both north and south of the river — and east. There were no bridges down in here Bacon’s day; only London Bridge with its many tall houses far downstream. Most of your traffic in this zone was by boat. There were regular ferries at places like Twickenham.

You can see the vast green expanse of Richmond Park to the south. The green blob in the north is Kew Gardens, a fabulous retreat I’ve blogged about already. Wherry on up river (down on the map, confusingly) past Kingston upon Thames and you’ll take a sharp turn to the left/west, swing north again, and find yourself at Hampton Court Palace surrounded by more sumptuous greenery. That’s how it works. First you have centuries of overweening noblepersons pushing struggling cottagers off the best land; then you have a big world war and a major economic restructuring, and all these parks become, er, parks. Public parks, if you can afford to shlep yourself down here.

Richmond Green, standing in the street in front of the old gatehouse, I think.

Details and dimensions

Ian Dunlop (reference below) used many sources to reveal the contours of England’s lost palaces, including an anonymous description written in Henry VII’s reign and Francis Bacon’s biography of that same king. Bacon would have spent many days at Richmond Palace, and perhaps some nights. He had his own small lodge at Twickenham right across the river, so he could have commuted. I put him in a small, undistinguished chamber at the palace for narrative convenience. (I would have had to make a character out of one of those wherrymen.)

But it’s possible he would have insisted on a chamber in the palace along with the other courtiers. I figure it’s like staying at the hotel where the conference is being held, rather than at a cheaper place down the road. You want to be where the action is.

Narrow winding stairs, perhaps like the ones in these slender towers. Run up and down one of these in a late period farthingale! I double-dare ya!

Dunlop says the palace covered some 10 acres. By comparison, Richmond Green, across which I have walked, is 20 acres. Most of what we see in the engraving is a complex structure called the Privy Lodgings. There were 14 of those bulb-domed towers, each topped with a gilded weather vane flying a gold & azure banner. In between the towers were three-story buildings, all built of brightly colored stone, all with lots of diamond-paned windows. It must have looked like a fairy palace. It was obviously not built for defense, which must have been part of the point Henry VII was making.

Twelve rooms on each floor, I read. Of what? I ask. There’s no floor plan and that “Privy Lodgings” looks like a multi-building area with probably alleys running between micro-courts, necessary to let in light. I pretty much stayed out it. Somewhere in there, probably facing the Middle Court, were the Queen’s actual chambers: the Presence Chamber, the Privy Chamber where she spent most of the day with her favorites, and the Privy Bedchamber. I imagined these to be laid out much like its contemporary, Fontainebleu, which I visited in May and will blog about soon.

That Middle Court was a treat, in its day. In the center there was a fountain with lions and red dragons and goodly beasts in the upper part, in the middle branches of red roses and other flowers with water running out, and clear pure water into the cistern at the bottom. A good place to stand around in your fancy clothes and gossip, I should think, noticing who is noticing you from the windows of the Privy Chamber above.

The gatehouse is all that’s left. Following this fellow, we walk from Richmond Green into what used to be the Great Court. It’s a square of buildings now, as then, but full of parked cars and thus not much fun to photograph.

The Great Hall, where everyone had their meals and where plays must have been performed in the winter, was 100 ft x 40 ft. Must have had a magnificent hammerbeam ceiling. Outside the hall, past that cone-headed kitchen, we find a confused parcel of buildings, constructed mostly of brick and timber. Flesh larders, fish larders, pastry, and plummery (a place for preserving fruit?), poultry house, scalding house, wood yard, coal house, and at a discreet distance,” ‘a large House of office.’ This is what they called a group toilet. There would have been pipes or a ditch taking the effluent to the river, one assumes.

They got their drinking water from springs in New Park – the White Conduit – and Richmond Town Fields – the Red Conduit. Some of this clean water ran into the fancy fountain in the Middle Court. Servants must have gotten water for their masters to wash their faces there, early in the morning.

Nothing anywhere tells me how many people lived in the palace when the Queen was there. But I find a note about food supplies. Each officer has a cook to look after his food in the Queen’s Kitchens. 18 kitchens, each crowded, a veritable hell. 80-100 sheep consumed every day, 12 head of cattle, a dozen and a half calves, in addition to what’s hunted – rabbits, birds, wild boar, venison.

Pass through the gate leaving the Middle Court and enter the Great Court, 78 feet x 180 ft, paved, surrounded by a range of two-storied buildings for Gentlemen and Grooms of the Privy Chamber and Gentlemen of the Bedchamber.

Officers: Cup-Bearer, Carver, Sewer, Grooms of the Privy Chamber, Spicery, and Chandlery, the Confectioner, the Housekeeper, the Porter, the Chaplains, the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber…. These lodged in the outer quadrangle, aka the Wardrobe Court. Two-story houses which lay between privy chambers and the outer gate, insulating the royal family. I put the Gentlewomen of the Privy Chambers out here, and stuck poor Francis Bacon at the top of an addition to the gatehouse.

Re-creation

Some smart folks at the University of Southern California created a re-creation of Richmond Palace as part of a study of Power and Politics of Architecture in Tudor England. Dashed interesting stuff, what? I relied on their drawing for moving my people around. One small point: the row of buildings on the right side of the Great Court look one-storied in their plan, but Dunlop said two. So I made them two.

They have a three-dimensional version here. Have I mentioned lately how much I love scholars? We would be so much poorer, intellectually and imaginatively, without them. Let’s keep those actual facts flowing, folks, and preserve the institutions that make the work possible.

See the orchards near the river on the top left? I love orchards. We had cherry trees, probably some of them espaliered against those warm brick walls. Undoubtedly also pears, apples, peaches, gooseberries, raspberries, and plums. Coming toward us, at the bottom left of the plan, is the big formal garden through which we stroll, morning and evening, in our colorful raiment. Level, symmetrical, neat, loaded with symbolism — that’s what Tudors liked in a garden! Leave the wildness out there in the wilderness.

But they would have fantastic beasts of carved and painted wood on pillars dotted about. I’m afraid those things are just long gone. But I can close with one from a recreation at Hampton Court, courtesy of Culture 24.

References

Duncan, Andrew. 2002. Favourite London Walks: 50 Classic Routes Exploring London’s Heritage. London: New Holland. [NB: This book is printed on coated stock, so it is heavy! I copy the walks I mean to take and just carry the featherweight sheets of printer paper.]

Montague-Smith, Patrick, and Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd. 1981. The Country Life Book of Royal Palaces, Castles & Homes, Including Vanished Palaces and Historic Houses with Royal Connections. Country Life Books.